On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 9:58 AM Imobach González Sosa <igonzalezsosa@suse.de> wrote:
El lun, 20-04-2020 a las 09:23 -0400, Neal Gompa escribió:
On Mon, Apr 20, 2020 at 9:11 AM Imobach González Sosa <igonzalezsosa@suse.de> wrote:
El vie, 17-04-2020 a las 10:21 +0200, Mathias Homann escribió:
Am Freitag, 17. April 2020, 09:10:52 CEST schrieb Imobach González Sosa:
We have started started to analyze and build a list of the things we would like to address, but we would love to hear your opinion. Do you have some use case you would like to see supported? Which problems have you faced when using AutoYaST? Which features do you miss? Do you have a different vision of what AutoYaST should be (we can learn from those opinions too)?
I have tried several times to get into autoyast... and every time given up at some point, due to complexity.
Especially compared to the other automated installation that i'm familiar with (RHEL/CentOS/fedora kickstart) AutoYAST seems unnecessarily complex to me...
Hi Mathias,
I admit that I do not have experience with kickstart. Having said that, what do you mean by "unnecessarily complex"? Is it about having to deal with XML? Or do you mean that writing an AutoYaST profile is hard?
I can't speak for Mathias, but in my experience, writing a Kickstart is really straightforward.
Not to mention there are a lot of tools that support it natively (including one I currently maintain!), which makes it a lot easier to leverage for mass provisioning of different types (live media creation, PXE and install image creation, auto-installation, etc.). And this extends beyond just RH/Fedora systems, as even Ubuntu supports it with kickseed (which I've used for provisioning Ubuntu systems).
Are kickstarts perfect? No, but they are really easy to make and deploy, with support by a huge ecosystem of tools.
Kickstarts are defined by the pykickstart project: https://github.com/pykickstart/pykickstart
I packaged pykickstart for openSUSE a while ago for some development work I was doing: https://build.opensuse.org/package/show/home:Pharaoh_Atem:SUSE_LiveCDTools/p...
Thanks Neal,
Yes, you (and Mathias) have a good point. We need to provide better tools to deal with AutoYaST profiles. On the one hand, we have a UI that it is partially broken and, on the other hand, 'cloning' the current system usually generates a profile which is too big (although you can narrow to clone just a subset of modules).
On the other hand, validation is another area to improve. Sure you can use 'jing' to validate a profile, but it would be nice to have some runtime validation too.
Finally, although the documentation is good (as a reference), we have been considering for some time providing a set of profile examples for different use cases, so the user can take inspiration (or simply copy&paste) from there.
One thing that helped massively improve the quality of kickstarts used in the RH/Fedora ecosystem is that Anaconda was retooled years ago (just a year or so before RHEL 7 was branched from Fedora) to internally generate a kickstart for user actions and use *that* to actually do the installation. That kickstart file would get written into /root/anaconda-ks.cfg, letting people see how they were set up and cloning from that. These tended to make very clean kickstarts that people can easily customize. Whether YaST gains support for Kickstart or does something interesting to AutoYaST, this would be a good path to make more usable auto-installation setups based on a manual setup. -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth! -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org